As development of the Internet and groupware environments has progressed, an exchange of electronic data has been more and more frequently performed, not only between individuals, but also among members within a company in various business transactions. For example, electronic data for various slips, contracts and other documents may be exchanged by users within a specific area. Since such data are often used in common by a number of different users for convenience, data access management procedures must be established to provide protection for the data and to prevent unauthorized or illegal use by outsiders.
Generally, person in charge of controlling data access rights (called a manager) is responsible for providing an appropriate level of access management. For example, an original author or creator who has created a specific document file, or a person who is authorized to grant a right to access the file (hereinafter collectively referred to as a “granter”), designates the users or user groups who should be permitted to use the document file for the manager (the manager may also be the granter). Then, the manager enters and records the designated permissions by granters in a system, so that only the designated users can access the document file. That is, users can not refer to data that are used in common by multiple users until after they have been granted permission to access such data by the granter directly or through the manager, as well as after they have been reported reference information for data they want to access.
It should be noted that when the term “report (transmit or notify of) reference information” is used hereinafter, it does not mean transmission of data per se. It means transmission of information that is required to access such data. While the detailed operations differ depending on the function of applications that are employed, “reporting reference data” corresponds, for example, to transmission of database icons which are created within an electronic mail by using a NOTES system, a groupware product that is available from Lotus Development Corp.
In certain case, wherein a number of persons are authorized to grant access rights for the same data, each person so authorized can arbitrarily select users to whom data access rights are to be granted. Therefore, it tends to be difficult to trace and specifically identify the authorizing person who approved access rights to a specific user.
In the real world, it is assumed that the right to access a specific document is granted a person when he or she receives the document. For example, when an author A hands a specific document to person B, since the author A has in effect granted person B permission to read the document (=grants an access right), person B can read the document (=can actually access or refer to). That is, in normal transactions in the real world, the granting of access rights to data and the act of referring to the data can be performed at the same time. However, in a conventional computer system, before a user is permitted to refer to data, permission to access the data must be provided for the user. That is, in a conventional computer system, since permission to access data must be granted in advance, one more extra step is required than is needed in the real world situation.
Further, in the real world, the history of granting access permission can be understood by tracing the route from which a document is obtained. But in a conventional computer system, since the record of procedures by which access permission is granted is not retained, or is retained only as a time log for the whole data, it is difficult to trace historical data concerning who approved the granting of access permission for specific data.